UBports Newsletter #2

Februari 24th 2017

Around 2,200 companies will exhibit on the Mobile World Congress from Monday February 26 till Thursday March 2nd, spread over 9 halls, receiving over a 100,000 visitors. There is a special track for women (Women4Tech http://bit.ly/2giXNfu), children (YoMo) and Startups (4YFN). Like previous years it is promised to be quite an event.

As you could read in the previous newsletter UBports is going to share a booth with Canonical to tell about our goal and the project Ubuntu for Fairphone 2 in specific.

Fairphone is also participating in the MWC. Last time they were at the world’s largest mobile event they generated a lot of publicity only by telling their story, along with the launch of Fairphone 2. The sustainable entreprise was wondering at first if a booth was really needed to tell about their phone, but they decided to take a spot on the exhibitor’s floor.

UBports is planning to bring Fairphones on Ubuntu for people to see and test. Telling visitors about the combination of a sustainable smartphone with an Ubuntu OS is important to us, but also explaining the story behind Fairphone is something UBports sees to it that their message is being spread. Fairphone is on a brave, sustainable mission and UBports likes to help in pushing that forward. Listen to the TEDx talk of initiator Bas van Abel where he tells about the reasons he and his team wanted to make a phone on their own. An interesting story with this following quote that summarizes that clear and brave mission: “ If you start with making a phone, if you’d use the phone as something to start understanding the whole economy behind it and the whole system behind it, we can actually challenge the system from within.”

Fairphone came a long way. The TEDx talk was from 2013. In the meantime the company went from Fairphone 1 to 2, to 125,000 users, mentioned in 6000 articles of worldwide media such as Le Monde and the BBC, their company grew from 30 to 70 co-workers and Fairphone is now available at Telecom providers such as ETC Mobil, Mobilcom, 1&1, T-Mobile, KPN, POST, Swisscom and The Phone Co-op.